The Perils of Giving Books to Other People's Children

In honour of gift-giving season I’ve been re-reading childhood books. No, not out of nostalgia; this is defensive reading. I’m trying to prevent that awkward backlash that comes from accidentally giving someone else’s children something unsavoury. Like, say, Anne of Green Gables.

Oh, you might think the internationally adored Canadian classic would be a safe bet for the 10-year-old on your list. But you’ve clearly overlooked the violence in the book. Remember when she responds to Gilbert’s teasing by whacking him over the head with a slate? You wouldn’t want to inspire some kid to smack a classmate with her iPad would you?

I’ve learned the hard way that classics are often a risky choice as gifts. Despite E.B. White’s elegantly simple prose, Charlotte’s Web can raise parental ire because the spider dies and her pal Wilber, the pig, is destined for the abattoir. As White points out, the dinner table is the usual fate of farm animals without jobs. Both scenarios run the risk of traumatizing city kids who are led to believe steak grows on Styrofoam plates—or so their doting parents tell me.

From the time the children in my midst were old enough to understand a story, I recited my favourite Lewis Carroll poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, and distributed cunning pop-up picture books. Among the poem’s many virtues is that it alerts kids to the hazards of being gullible and wandering off with charming strangers who are promising treats. For those of you unfamiliar with the tale, it features feckless young oysters who are eaten after they trot off with the wily carpenter and his plump pal, the Walrus. I always assumed the poem was a sort of streetproofing for Victorian children, set to a clever rhyme. That was until some acquaintances warned me about upsetting their children with visions of cannibalism.

If classics aren’t the gifting solution, don’t think contemporary tomes solve the problem. As the fundamentalist Christian lobby tells us, Harry Potter deals in black magic and pagan notions of all sorts. And the sort of rational parent who objects to crazy New Agers claiming that wishful thinking can control the universe are also inclined to criticize the boy wizard. Since many atheists are also opposed to C.S. Lewis’s Christian themes lurking in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series, I feel it’s best to avoid stories with any hint of magic. (There goes the classic King Arthur and Camelot tales, and the modern feminist reading of Morgan Le Fay for the girls.)

I know all this because, at one time or another, I’ve run afoul of

helicopter parents anxious to protect their little darlings from the hazards of literature. But much like the bookshop owner in Nora Ephron’s classic film, You’ve Got Mail, I persist in the belief that what children read shapes their views and values in a way nothing else ever will. So I’m sure the kids in receipt of my books will thank me later. Probably at about the same time they enter therapy and start cursing their parents.

Of course, I may be on the wrong track. Philip Nel, co-author of the book Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (2008), notes that all kid-lit is political, although it’s common for young audiences to miss the message. Certainly all the tree-huggers I know hand out Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax to every impressionable child they can find, but I’m not sure the gloomy tale turns them into environmentalists.

Still, this year I’m feeling optimistic. Since I have several young friends of just the right age and disposition to read one of my childhood favourites, Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild, I was planning to circulate it widely. As a ballet student myself I was charmed by the adventures of the Fossil sisters, who studied acting and dancing and lived in a rambling old Victorian house with a collection of whimsical boarders in 1930s London.

But just to be safe, I re-read the book and it turns out that 10-year-old me was shockingly blind to details. The Fossil girls, a trio of unrelated fosterlings who were collected by an eccentric old archeologist, are actually the victims of remarkably lax child labour laws.

I’d forgotten our heroines were training to go on the stage because they needed the money and 12-year-olds could get a special work permit as performers. The 1936 novel is set at the height of the Depression, and the old crackpot who is their nominal guardian has abandoned them. His spinster niece Sylvia has run out of money to raise the foundlings, and the boarders are a necessity. The girls need to take a trade, not least because Sylvia is looking tired and thin and has a cough that makes me suspect consumption.

The plucky Fossils are only 11, 10 and 8 but they know there’s a wolf at the door. The tone of the book emphasizes hard work, independence, thrift and a host of values entirely unknown to children who were raised to have little more than self-esteem. Speaking of which, when blond beauty Pauline scores her first part as the star in a children’s show, she becomes a demanding narcissist and the adults in her life promptly relieve her of the role. Having seen current fashions in child-rearing, which seem curiously designed to foster narcissism, I’m fairly certain most parents won’t approve of that.

There’s also a disturbing subplot about one of their classmates who is talented, diligent and loses parts because she’s not pretty, which suggests the world is unfair. Are my giftees old enough to learn this? Then again, in an age where every kid wants to be a YouTube star, perhaps they can’t learn it fast enough.

There’s also a faint whiff of scandal about the peculiar school. Their teacher is a Russian émigré who escaped the revolution and is now training child performers under a sort of indentured servant scheme, which gives her a cut of their earnings. (How is this legal?) She’s not exactly Fagin teaching Oliver Twist and the boys to pick pockets, but there’s something sinister about the whole enterprise that I can’t quite put my finger on.

I don’t remember feeling anxious as a child watching the Fossil family sliding into less-than-genteel poverty with only a trio of tap-dancing tweens to save ’em. But I can just imagine that parents trying to shield their kids from headlines that scream the economy is tanking again might not want their precious darlings exposed to such realities.

So I’m still hesitating on this gift. The book has a happy ending, of course, but the journey to get there offers so much scope for parental outrage. Then again, I don’t want to end up being the auntie notorious for giving pajamas. I used to wonder what she was thinking. Sadly, now I know.

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